David Lynch
Inland Empire

An "old" rule established since the days of "Lost Highway" (with the exception of "The Straight Story") dictates that Lynch's films basically make no sense.

At least not at first. At least certainly not in a complete manner, never at 100%, never with the certainty of the univocal nature of the projection. The multiplicity of possible interpretations is what made “Mulholland Drive” an absolute masterpiece for me, where the formal chaos, and then the inner turmoil, justified one of the most wonderful and acute depictions of desires, memories, and unconsciousness ever seen through the seventh art. What is crucial for me in any art, and what “Mulholland Drive” fully respects is the Meaning. Every image, every staging, every formula must have meaning in relation to what it expresses, narrates.

And it is precisely this meaning that is missing in “Inland Empire,” in which one cannot talk about a multiplicity of interpretations, but rather of a lack of tangible interpretations. Where, therefore, a film like “Mulholland Drive” inspired a type of projection, of incomplete, imperfect, insecure imagination, and precisely in this revealed its splendid complete meaning, “Inland Empire” drags in a totally abstruse operation that doesn’t inspire, but rather demands that the viewer, at all costs, finds something in it, keeping up with a frantic, disorganized staging whose pure and simple essence is that of provocation, NOT expression. Let’s be clear: Lynch remains one of the greatest directors around, indeed, one of the few directors still definable as such in a classical sense. His sense of imagery remains unmatched or one of very few equals in the current film world; at the level of individual images or sequences, this remains a truly beautiful film. But it’s something that suits aesthetes, who probably won’t notice that as the film entirely loses the thread of the plot with which it was introduced, a strict provocative chain follows, where 10-15 minutes of claustrophobic delirium are followed by interludes with loud music, or with sudden unsettling images, which Lynch deploys with the clear intent of rousing the interest of an audience that CAN'T follow it all with the same level of interest (let alone empathy...), while to conclude, Lynch consciously inserts a sadistic FURTHER epilogue (after the undeniably wonderful finale, but hardly conceivable as PART of the film and not as something standalone, like the rest of the sequences), which moreover almost seems to define all that was seen before as a gigantic farce (but various intellectuals may never conceive it in this sense...).

Lynch is not new to such operations; already "Fire Walk with Me" seemed like a sadistic mockery of Twin Peaks enthusiasts, and "Inland Empire" more than any other possible critical interpretation, seems to suggest the sole undeniable principle of provocation. Its disorganization reminded me more than anything else of "Eraserhead"... but "Eraserhead" was a wonderful fresco that presented first and foremost in a historical sense as a resurgence of surrealism, and most importantly, it was tangibly a staging of unconscious disturbances and nightmares related to the visceral, the carnal, and many other elements that contributed to making it one of the most genuinely unsettling films ever seen on screen. In "Inland Empire," the manneristic paroxysm surpasses any other element and with this, while I cannot absolutely state it is a failure or a bad film, it remains one of Lynch's least successful and possibly most limited works.